Rio de Janeiro post-show. Small stories, big ideas.

Up at the crack of noon and sat by the pool with Andre Dubus. He's such an extraordinary writer. I had a collection of his years ago, and this new book "Dancing After Hours" is another short story collection. They're just devastating stories, he gets inside his character's emotions in such a vivid way. This whole collection is about relationships, men & women. Ordinary people, but after you've read a few you begin to see the patterns emerging and how the common experiences overlap. You can only read one at a time because they leave flare trails in your mind for the rest of the day.

Evening stroll with Joe, right along the sea front. Found a market selling all manner of stuff. I ended up buying an inconveniently large oil painting of the Rio carnival - a bright expressionistic number, plus a plethora of glow-in-the-dark Christ The Redeemers, fridge magnets, etc.

Within the bands entourage (certainly by comparison to the crews clockwork scheduling) travel departure times are often a little loose. This morning was especially so, due to three contradictory memos which had been emailed out last night and this morning.

There was a 6.30pm conference call arranged between Bono (Dublin), The Edge (Los Angeles), Steve Matthews (London) and myself (also London) to blow the cobwebs off our brains and discuss the reincarnation of the Vertigo Tour.

I was planning on resurrecting the tour diary today, being the day we were scheduled to fly to Auckland for the load-in tomorrow. However, its now old news that the remainder of the tour dates have been postponed, so Im not going anywhere further than the corner cafe. Its been a very weird week indeed - much akin to driving into a wall.